Political neophyte Ghannon Burton carried nine northeast Mississippi counties against incumbent Sen. Roger Wicker in the Republican primary. Only Alcorn County in that neck of the state stuck with him. Guess the robocalls from Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy didn’t help much up there.

Burton, a retired Marine colonel and former F/A-18 pilot with Top Gun credentials, carried the counties of Tippah, Prentiss, Union, Lee, Itawamba, Pontotoc, Calhoun, Chickasaw and his home county of Tishomingo. Wicker carried all other counties, but Burton’s 25% vote statewide was respectable. He also ran ahead of State Rep. Dan Eubanks in most counties. It will be interesting to see if he rides these results into a future race.

Eubanks finished third with 14% and lost his home county of DeSoto two to one to Wicker. Burton was a distant third. In the November general election, Wicker will face Ty Pinkins who was unopposed in the Democratic Primary.

Former President Donald Trump easily won Mississippi’s Republican delegates with 92% of the vote. President Joe Biden was unopposed in the Democratic Primary. All incumbent congressmen advanced.

One day later, March 13th, the big surprise in the Mississippi Senate died. Sen. Dennis DeBar’s bill to “save” Mississippi University for Women by giving it to Mississippi State University died. He had introduced a measure to transfer the Mississippi School for Math and Science to MSU which came to the Senate Education Committee that he chairs. At the last minute he surprisingly added the MUW transfer to the bill.

W forces geared up quickly to fight the bill. Even after DeBar passed an amendment to change his bill from a transfer to a study, it failed. Contributing to that defeat was another bill the Senate did pass that calls for a study. Sen. Nicole Boyd, chair of the Senate Higher Education Committee (which never saw DeBar’s bill), passed her bill calling for an efficiency study of all eight IHL universities.

Boyd’s bill would establish a 10-member Mississippi University System Efficiency Task Force to “examine the efficiency and effectiveness of the public university system in Mississippi, as it relates to the universities’ collective mission of enrolling and graduating more degreed Mississippians and retaining them in the state, and anticipated nationwide challenges with regard to demographic shifts and a projected overall decline in enrollment.”

Translated that means the universities experiencing enrollment declines, particularly the smaller ones like the W, will be carefully scrutinized.

Boyd’s bill will move on to the House for consideration.

Crawford is a syndicated columnist from Jackson.